Bermuda Rules: Community Spirit, With Teeth

The “Bermuda Rules” may sound like standards for lawn tennis, but in fact they are guidelines for releasing human sequence data. Established in February 1996 at a Bermuda meeting of heads of the biggest labs in the publicly funded genome project, the rules instruct competitors in this cutthroat field to give away the fruits of their research for free. “The whole raison d'être for the communal effort was to get useful tools into the hands of the scientific community as rapidly as possible,” says Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But the rules also offer another benefit: They discourage the patenting of genes by sequencing labs, an activity executives of big pharmaceutical companies seem to despise as much as some academics do. The insistence on quick, unconditional release of data also lies at the heart of the dispute between publicly funded genome scientists and the private company that has just produced a draft version of the human genome, Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland.